From April 13 to 15, Pope Leo XIV will visit the Great Mosque of Algiers, meet the country's tiny Christian community at the Basilica of Our Lady of Africa, and travel to the ancient city of Annaba, formerly known as Hippo Regius, where Saint Augustine served as bishop in the fifth century AD. For a pope who belongs to the Augustinian order, it is about as symbolic an itinerary as one could imagine.
Archbishop Jean-Paul Vesco, the French-born cardinal of Algiers, first extended the invitation on the day Leo XIV was elected – May 8, the feast day of Algeria’s 19 martyrs, when the deaths of 19 priests and nuns killed during Algeria’s civil war are remembered.
"I told him that, having been elected on that date, he had to be the first pope to come," Vesco told FRANCE 24. Pope Leo’s response was immediate – he accepted on the spot.
Algiers, for its part, was effusive when the visit was announced in February, welcoming it as a chance to “consolidate the bonds of friendship, trust and understanding uniting Algeria and the Vatican State" and opening new prospects for cooperation between the two countries. The groundwork had already been laid in 2025, when President Abdelmadjid Tebboune met the newly elected pope in a private audience just three months after his election.
‘Visceral hostility’
Such warmth has not always characterised the Vatican’s relations with Algiers. While Morocco has hosted a pope twice – John Paul II in 1985 and Francis in 2019 – and Tunisia welcomed John Paul II in 1996, Algeria had never done so.
"This trip clearly marks a break," said Mehdi Ghouirgate, a professor of Arabic studies at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne, who admitted the announcement left him "very surprised".
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The reasons for Algeria's longstanding reluctance are not hard to find. "Since the war of independence, the ideological bedrock of the FLN (National Liberation Front) has been a struggle against France, its ideology and colonialism, which was partly bound up with the Catholic Church. There is a form of visceral hostility towards Christianity that runs deep," Ghouirgate explained. That hostility only hardened under former president Houari Boumédiène in the 1970s, and deepened further in the decades that followed.
"While Morocco cultivated the image of an Islam-friendly papacy by welcoming John Paul II in the 1980s, Algeria always refused any such gesture," he said.
The lowest point came during the Black Decade (1992-2002) of the Algerian civil war, when 19 priests and nuns – since recognised as the Martyrs of Algeria – were killed. Their beatification in Oran in 2018 began to close that wound.
"The pope is coming to Algeria, 30 years after the monks of Tibhirine, Bishop Claverie of Oran and others were killed. That seems to be one of the reasons for this visit," said Rémi Caucanas, a research fellow at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome.
"Theirs was not a martyrdom of combat, it was a martyrdom in the service of dialogue between the Church and Islam. The pope is coming to honour that witness."
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Caucanas said the trip also had a deeper, more personal logic. Leo XIV follows the Rule of Saint Augustine, written in the late fourth century. "Augustine's thought provides a genuine foundation for interfaith dialogue. The pope's approach here is enormously powerful," he said.
Vesco also cites Pope Leo’s recent history. "He already came to Algeria twice when he was superior general of the order. He knows these places," he said, adding that the visit is also the fulfilment of a long-held ambition within the Church. "Pope Francis told me he wanted to come, but he fell ill."
Since taking office last year, Leo XIV has made only one major foreign trip, though he has already visited Turkey and Lebanon, two Muslim-majority countries, in November and December. "I would not have been surprised if Pope Francis had come to Algeria himself, had he still been alive," Caucanas said. "He laid the groundwork that makes this visit possible."
A deteriorating record on religious freedom
A papal visit to a country with about 10,000 Catholics among 48 million people might seem an odd proposition. But Caucanas pushes back on that reading.
"Previous popes have shown that these visits do not need to match the size of the local Christian community. The significance of the Church in Algeria is not numerical. Its smallness, its precariousness … that is precisely what gives it symbolic force in Christian-Muslim relations."
The backdrop, however, is not a comfortable one. Open Doors, the NGO that tracks Christian persecution worldwide, ranks Algeria 20th on its World Watch List. A 2006 ordinance requires non-Muslim religious associations to obtain government approval before operating, a rule that has led to the closure of dozens of churches, particularly evangelical Protestant ones.
"Religious freedom is extremely restricted," said François Mabille, a research fellow at the IRIS (French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs) think tank and director of its Geopolitical Observatory of Religion.
The same ordinance carries a prison sentence of up to five years for anyone attempting to convert a Muslim. This provision aimed squarely at the country's estimated 60,000 evangelical Christians, whom authorities often accuse of proselytising. The Catholic Church occupies a different position in official eyes. "It is known as a 'Church of presence' with no mission of expansion, no proselytising agenda," Mabille said. "Its work revolves around education, healthcare and social solidarity. In that sense, the pope is also drawing a deliberate distinction between Catholics and Protestants."
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Against this backdrop, Archbishop Vesco said the visit was also an opportunity to push back against what he described as a reductive image of Algeria that does not do the country justice.
"Algeria is infinitely more complex than the way it is perceived from France. It has an ancient history. The pope’s visit, also tied to Saint Augustine, lends deeper historical resonance to the story. There is a Christian, pre-Christian, pre-Islamic and pre-colonial history. All of this is in the soul of Algerians," he said.
The visit also hands Algiers a rare piece of good news. Algeria has steadily lost ground, above all on the Sahara question, Ghouirgate said. The region is a vast mineral-rich former Spanish colony that is largely controlled by Morocco but has been claimed for decades by the pro-independence Polisario Front, which is supported by Algeria. “While Morocco has played the soft power game with considerable skill, Algiers has lurched from one misstep to the next," Ghouirgate added. A pope on Algerian soil changes that, at least for a moment.
"This rapprochement allows Algeria to establish a favourable narrative to remind the world that it is a nation with deep roots, one that can claim a towering historical figure like Saint Augustine as its own. This is a trip that will leave its mark."
This article has been translated from the original in French.
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